Hi Folks! I have a new freebie for you! It was going to be part of a sequel to Science Unit Studies for Homeschoolers and Teachers, but I’ve decided to give it away for free instead. You can download the free pdf here: Maps, Ages 4-7

If you like it and the other science freebies on my Lessons and Activities Page, you might also like Science Unit Studies for Homeschoolers and Teachers, available at Amazon at the following link:

Enjoy!

Sue

How Lucky We are to Be Able to Homeschool!

It has struck me lately how lucky we are to live in a country that allows homeschooling. Our country, in spite of becoming more and more regulated, still gives parents the right to choose how their children are educated. Others are not so lucky. For example, in Sweden on June 29, 2009, the Johanasson family had decided to immigrate to India where Annie, the mother of the family, was born. They were on the airplane about to take off when suddenly the Swedish police came on board and tore their 7-year-old son, Domenic, from their arms. Their terrible crime? A crime worthy of stealing a child from his parents? Child abuse? Murder? No, none of these. It was homeschooling. Oh and there was a further charge of neglect, due to Domenic having some cavities (which his parents were aware of and had planned to deal with once they reached India) and his parents’ choice not to give him some vaccines (something many parents chose to not do in this country). This story is incredible to those of us who live in a free society. In 2012, a Swedish appeals court ordered the guardianship of Domenic transferred to a third party. His parents are not allowed to have any contact with him at all. You can read more about this case at: Desperate Homeschooling Parents Plead for Help or Domenic Johansson to Face Christmas without Parents.

But Sweden is not the only country hostile to homeschooling families. Germany’s high court refused to strike down a statute that imposes penalties on homeschoolers, saying that “children can only learn how to be good citizens in schools.” One German judge has said that “The children would grow up in a parallel society without having learned to be integrated or to have a dialogue with those who think differently and facing them in the sense of practicing tolerance.” It seems to me that it is the judge who is practicing intolerance here.

The atmosphere in Germany is so hostile to homeschoolers that the Romeike family fled to the United States and asked for asylum so that they could continue homeschooling. Another homeschooling family, the Wunderlichs, have been battling the German authorities for years. According to an HSLDA factsheet, they were fined for homeschooling in 2006 and left Germany. Their children were taken away from them while they were in France, based on what the family thinks were vague complaints from German social workers. The French authorities found the children to be well cared for and immediately returned them to their parents. The family returned to Germany to find work in 2012, and custody of their children was taken away from them. The children were, however, allowed to stay with their parents. Then in August 2013, their children were taken from home in a police raid on the house. They were returned about three weeks later in September 2013. Since then, the children have been able to stay with their family, but their parents still could be facing steep fines and punishments. Recently they were warned that if they continue homeschooling they could face up to four years in prison. All of this government interference in a family was because they chose to homeschool.

I find the Germany homeschooler’s problems particularly interesting as it relates to a book I read a few years back titled, Hansi, the Girl Who Loved the Swastika. It is the story of a young Czechoslovakian girl who won a scholarship to a Nazi school in 1940. She says of the school, “Hitler was with us every hour. . . . His sayings were quoted in every class. His doctrines were our most important study.” This book is a great illustration of how a school curriculum can twist children’s thinking and change their basic beliefs. That, to me, is the most dangerous thing about a national curriculum. If you get the wrong people in charge of your government, you are giving them complete control over what children are learning in school. In a very short time, Hitler was able to gain control over the young people’s minds in his country by using the German school system. And now the German school system is behind the persecution of German homeschooling families for wanting to teach their children different values than they would learn in school.

Just in time for Thanksgiving, I have decided to indefinitely lower the Kindle price of the first book in my Our America historical chapter book series, The Pilgrim Adventure, to $2.99. This book with the new Kindle price can be found here: The Pilgrim Adventure.

A Pet Peeve

I am starting to have a “pet peeve.” We recently moved from a state that was full of homeschoolers (mostly because the state’s education system wasn’t all that great) to a state with less homeschoolers. Before we moved, if I mentioned to a stranger that we were homeschooling, I usually heard comments like, “That’s great! I wish I could homeschool.”

However, things are different now that we’ve moved, and I’m starting to notice a pattern to the comments. They all seem to focus on telling me a story about a homeschooler the person knows who has not turned out well. Actually, most of them are about homeschoolers who are still living at home as adults, although one was about a homeschooler who turned to drugs in college.

So here’s my pet peeve. . . . Homeschoolers are somehow expected to be different from other kids. If they don’t become little Einsteins, but are just normal kids, then somehow we’ve made a mistake in homeschooling them. And if, heaven forbid, they are living at home as adults, then somehow we’ve failed. Of course, the people who think this neglect to remember that young adults all over the country are tending to live at home more because of the current economy. But when homeschoolers do it, somehow we’ve failed.

When my private-schooled niece moved back home for a year after college while she was job hunting, it didn’t even cross my mind that her parents might have made a mistake sending her to an excellent private high school. So why is it that when a homeschooler moves back home it is considered “odd?” And as for the drugged-out homeschooler mentioned above, how many public-schooled kids turn to drugs in college? Zero?

Raising children to be responsible adults in this modern world is challenging for all parents these days—homeschooled or not. Anyone who takes on the challenge deserves our respect, no matter what vehicle they use for their children’s schooling.

Great News! The third book in my Our America series, The Salem Adventure is published! You can find it on Amazon at this link: The Salem Adventure.

In The Salem Adventure, Finn and Ginny continue to search for their lost parents while living in Salem Village during the witch trials. For more information on this and the other books in the series, go to the Our America page of this website.

To celebrate the new book, the Kindle version of The King Philip’s War Adventure will go on sale for FREE on July 15, 16, and 17th on Amazon, so mark your calendars so that you can take advantage of this offer. And if you and your children enjoy the book, I would really appreciate it if you would let Amazon know by writing a customer review of the book. This will help me with my future Amazon sales. The link to the Kindle version is: The King Philip’s War Adventure.

And now for the next part of my blog series on homeschooling:

How We Homeschooled the Elementary Years: History

This is the third in a series of posts on how our family homeschooled during the elementary school years. As I mentioned earlier, there are as many ways to homeschool as there are homeschoolers and just because something worked for our family, doesn’t mean that it will work for yours. These posts are just here to let you know what worked for one family.

As I look back on learning history in school, what strikes me now is how boring it was. I didn’t even realize that I had a love of history until long (very long) after I’d grown up.

The clue to making history interesting is hidden right in the word: History. History is the story of mankind. It’s a story full of loyalty, betrayal, love, pain, and suffering, everything you need to make an interesting read. But classic textbooks take all of this human interest and turn it into boring lists of dates and names with very little of the emotions behind the facts. And if you don’t understand the emotions behind the story, you’re never going to really understand history.

So how do we teach history to kids in a way that is fun and interesting? I used a combination of methods. History is a great subject to teach with unit studies, so we did lots of those, covering just about every historical topic that I could think of. There are many wonderful books out there full of fun activities having to do with history. You can find some of them on my list of homeschool books at this link: My Favorite Homeschool Resources. We cooked pioneer meals and ate them by candlelight, had a medieval fair with our homeschool friends, participated in a homeschool olympics, made countless crafts, and generally had a blast. I also gave my son many chapter books to read on the various time periods that we studied. I’ve listed as many as I could remember (and the list is growing) on the Historical Chapter Bookspage of this website. And, finally, we did use a couple of history courses, though, maverick that I am, I never followed them exactly. I liked these two courses because they told history as a story, not as a dry accumulation of facts. Both of them are on the My Favorite HomeschoolResources list: The Story of the World series and Calvert’sA Child’s History of the World. Both come with teachers’ guides full of activities. A Child’s History of the World (be sure you purchase a newer version, the older ones are not pc)is Calvert’s fourth grade history course and it does not (at least when I purchased it) need to be purchased with the rest of Calvert’s fourth grade materials. The Story of the World is split into four volumes. We found the fourth one to be a bit difficult and dry for elementary school.

So, my recommendation for teaching history is to toss out the textbooks and have fun with it! But, that’s just what worked for us.

This is the second in a series of posts on how our family homeschooled during the elementary school years. As I mentioned earlier, there are as many ways to homeschool as there are homeschoolers, and just because something worked for our family, doesn’t mean that it will work for yours. These posts are just here to let you know what worked for one family.

For math, we used a combination of courses in the beginning. I found the Math-U-See series helpful for teaching place value, but I also used the math workbook from the Calvert kindergarten curriculum mentioned in the earlier post, and various worksheets that I found on telling time and things like that.

Later, at about fourth grade, we switched solely to Saxon Math and haven’t looked back. I do not teach my son math; he teaches himself. I give him about half of a math assignment each day (15 problems, including all of the problems with the new concepts and every other problem pertaining to the old concepts until I reach 15 problems). If he does well on that half assignment, then the next day he skips ahead to the next assignment. If he doesn’t do well, then he does the second half of the assignment the following day. I do not teach him anything about the assignment. The Saxon books are written so that from fourth grade on, students can read the material in the book and learn it themselves without a teacher. After each lesson, I correct the assignment and then give it back to my son to correct any mistakes himself. We have a rule that he is allowed to ask me for help three times for each assignment. He can choose to do it either while he is doing the work or while he is correcting the assignment. Once he got used to this way of doing things (and it did take a bit of getting used to), he ended up saving his “helps” for the corrections. Nowadays, he almost never even asks for help.

If it appears to me that he is having particular trouble with a certain type of problem, I give him “extra math” for a few days, which consist of maybe three extra problems of the type that he is having difficulty with. Also, at one point, it seemed like he was having difficulty with math in general, and so I cut back on the number of problems he did in a day. Instead of giving him a half a lesson a day, I gave him a third of a lesson a day (about ten to eleven problems). We still skipped ahead if he did well on the portion of the lesson that he was given.

The first quarter of each Saxon book is pretty much a review of previous years, so whenever we start a new book, we skip the assignments at first, and instead I give him the first tests for that book to help determine where he needs to start in the book. If he gets an “A” or “B” on the first test, we skip to the next test. If he gets a “C,” we stop and he starts the book at the beginning (this has only happened once). The next day, I give him the second test. If he gets an “A,” we’ll skip ahead to the third test. If he gets a “C” on the second test, we stop, and he starts the book at the first lesson covered in the second test. If he gets a “B,” whether we skip ahead or stop depends on the grade of his previous test. If his previous test grade was an “A,” we skip ahead to the next test. If his previous grade was a “B,” we stop, and he starts the book at the first lesson covered in the second test.

Basically you can sum up what we do as follows: If he gets an “A” on the test, we move to the next one. If he gets a “C” on any test, we stop and start the book at the first lesson that is covered by the test that he got the “C” in. If he gets two “Bs” in a row, we stop, and he starts the book at the lessons that are covered by the second test that he received a “B” in. If he gets a “B,” then an “A,” then another “B,” we move on to the next test. At some point he’ll either get a “C,” or two “Bs” in a row, and that marks where he starts the new book. Through the years he’s started his new math books anywhere from lesson 1 to about lesson 25. My son has been tested on standardized tests twice now, and both times his math scores have been in the upper 5% when compared to other students his age nationally, so skipping ahead doesn’t seem to have hurt him, and he’s learning math two grade levels ahead of his age.

However, one thing that I would like to point out is that my son does not love math like he loves reading. So while this method has been very successful in teaching him math, I would have preferred that he also discovered an interest in it. However, from a testing standpoint, math is one of his best subjects, so he has a good foundation in math for whatever field he chooses to go into.

Now that my son is in the middle school years, I thought that it might be nice to look back on how we homeschooled during the elementary years to see if our experiences can help folks who are starting out on their homeschooling journey. My intention was to put it all in one post, but there is so much to say that I’m going to break it down by subject into a series of posts. As you read these posts, please remember that there are as many ways to homeschool as there are homeschoolers, and just because something worked for our family, doesn’t mean that it will work for yours. That’s one of the great things about homeschooling—if something isn’t working for your child, you can always change it. One thing that I highly recommend for any homeschooling family is to join a homeschooling group so that your children can meet other homeschoolers, and so that you can meet other homeschooling parents who might be able to give you ideas for methods or curriculums that you hadn’t even thought of. In my homeschooling group we have pretty much the full spectrum of homeschoolers—from unschoolers, to kids taking an online curriculum, and everything in between.

In the beginning, as many new homeschoolers do, I purchased a curriculum, (Calvert) in this case a kindergarten one. Then I proceeded to not use it. Oh, I did use some of it, especially the reading books that it came with, but I didn’t follow the lesson plans. Instead, I taught my son to read using the book Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. (Which a fellow homeschooler had recommended to me.) This book made teaching reading very simple. However, I didn’t even follow this book exactly. When I noticed that my son was getting bored and restless during the lessons, I realized that he didn’t need to complete each lesson. He was understanding the lessons so well that we could skip a portion of each lesson and go on to the next. After every lesson, I would have him read something to me from one of the easy reader books that I had collected. I found the Bob Books helpful for this. I also started going to garage sales and purchasing as many easy reader books as I could find. Later, we moved on to the Magic Tree House series.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I also made sure that our house was full of books for our son to read on his own. I read to him at bed time and during the day. I would give him reading assignments in books that I thought that he would enjoy, and often he would get involved in the books and continue reading them on his own. My main goal wasn’t just to teach him to read, but to get him to love to read. If you can do that for your child, then you have given him or her a gift for a lifetime.

]]>funtasticunitstudiesHomeschooling and Writinghttps://funtasticunitstudies.com/2012/05/10/114/
Thu, 10 May 2012 20:59:05 +0000http://funtasticunitstudies.com/?p=114I have a new book announcement for you all! I’m starting a series of Kindle eBooks called “How to Teaching Guides.” The first one is How to Teach a Newspaper Class for Middle and High School Grades. The idea for the book came from a class that I’ve been teaching this school year. The preface from the book explains how it all came about:

It is rare to find a child who loves every subject and wants to do them all. My son is no exception. For years I tore my hair out trying to find creative ways to get him to write. We made books, we made journals, he wrote letters and reports, but I still felt that something just wasn’t clicking. As a homeschooling mom I felt that I needed to come up with a better solution. My son was hitting middle school and it was time to work on this problem.

That was when I came up with the idea of teaching a newspaper class. Since my son is usually willing to try new things, I suggested the idea to him and he said, “Sure.” That was all the encouragement I needed. I did some research, signed up some kids for the class, and soon it was time for my son to write his first article. He’d been very excited about his ideas for the first issue, so he sat down at his computer, ready and eager to write, and….froze up. He had major writer’s block. He had no idea how to start his article. My heart sank. I’d committed myself to teaching this class for a year, and I was envisioning weekly arguments trying to get my son to write his articles.

But I’m also trying to teach my son not to be a quitter, so we persevered. I gave him some ideas for how to start his article, made him keep at it, and he wrote it. And he hasn’t looked back. Now, after taking the class for most of the year, he’s realized that writing, like anything, takes practice. He can see how much easier it is for him to write an article now compared to when he first started the class, and he’s not afraid of writer’s block anymore. This class may have been one of the best homeschooling ideas I’ve ever had.

I can’t recommend enough the idea of starting a newspaper to get kids interested in writing. That’s not to say that there aren’t other creative ways to do this. We’ve done a number of them through the years. One of our favorites was making books. There are a number of ways out there that your kids can make books that look like real published books. We purchased Creations by You kits and my son made limerick books, joke books, haiku books, and just plain story books.

Another thing we did was to make a scrapbook of events in his life. For each page of the scrapbook I would give him a short sheet of paper with lines on it that he would write about the event on. Once he was done, we’d paste it to the scrapbook page and then decorate the rest of the page with photos and other items.

One thing that some of my friend’s children are doing is writing blogs, either on their own or as part of a larger family blog.

All of these projects, including the newspaper class, have one thing in common. They produce something that has a larger purpose than just writing a story on a piece of paper. It seems like kids are more receptive to a writing project when they can see that it has a larger purpose, not just writing for the sake of writing.

Do any of you have any kids’ writing project ideas out there that you would like to share?